Michael Meacher MP

The Coalition Government have made a good start in Parliamentary reform, which may seem a rather anoraky subject, but actually is all about accountability, openness, and increasing the influence of elected MPs against the dead hand of the Whips – all of which is essential in any real democratic system.   The Government has already now opened up the whole public expenditure database to detailed scrutiny, is now implementing the Wright committee recommendations for election of the chair and members of Select Committees by the whole House in place of a stitch-up between the Whips, and tomorrow is expected to lay a Standing Order which cedes partial control of the Parliamentary agenda to an elected Back-Bench Business Committee.

None of this of course would have happened without a long, bruising struggle at the end of the last Parliament to get the all-party Wright committee proposals fully taken on board, debated on the floor of the House, and overwhelmingly voted for.   Alongside this committee the pressure also came from Parliament First, a vigorous all-party back-bench committee then chaired by Mark Fisher and now by me, all of whose members are passionately committed to restoring  Parliament to its real role in effectively holding the Executive to account and making MPs much more into transparent instruments of the popular will.

The ballot for electing 22 Select Committee chairs will take place tomorrow.   Having served as an MP for nearly 40 years, including 11 years as a Minister and 25 years on the Front Bench, I am standing for chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) since this too has always been at the heart of Parliamentary democracy and in the current straitened financial climate has an even more important role today.   (more…)

My lords, ladies, etc., etc., I’m pleased to present the first legislative programme of this new experimental coalition government – though I wish that their security was a bit tighter so that my speech, written by others, wasn’t also already leaked by others.

My government has made clear that their aim is the transformation of Britain.   They have therefore decided that their highest priority is to rein in the City of London whose poorly regulated malpractices so nearly caused a national financial and economic collapse.   They will therefore bring in a Banking Reform Bill to break up the banks so that they are no longer too big to fail, shrink the City so that it doesn’t crowd out our industrial and manufacturing sectors, prohibit banking involvement in hedge funds and private equity, and require all derivative financial products to be sanctioned by a revamped FSA before they can be traded.

My government will bring in a real Constitutional Reform Bill which will not only protect and enhance civil liberties – which is welcome though hardly transformative – but will also confront  the gross inequality of power in Britain today.   It will tackle the excessive power of the media (where balance, diversity and redress are urgently needed), the security services (where the ISC oversight committee is feeble and non-independent), the financial markets (where a Financial Activities Tax will be introduced), and the industrial sector (where a partnership framework for industrial relations will be introduced). (more…)

As the race (amble?) for the Labour Party leadership gets under way, the composition of the new PLP is beginning to come into focus.   The PLP accounts for a third of the electoral college and any intending candidate must secure public signatures from at least an eighth of all its members (therefore 32 in the present case) in order to be officially confirmed as a candidate.   This matters when last time round the Left was unable to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership because the selection system for parliamentary candidates had been so bent and manipulated to favour the preferred candidates for the Establishment for the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections that there weren’t even 45 PLP members (the relevant number then) who were willing to sign up to a Left candidate.

This time round the figures are slightly (but not much) more favourable for a Left challenge.    Preliminary analysis of the PLP suggests there are some 40 Left-leaning MPs (out of the total of 251), about 160 Right-wing (Blairite, Brownite or simply loyalist), plus a further 50 new Labour MPs whose affiliations are not yet precisely known.   At the last election a week ago about 80 Centre-Right members either stood down or lost their seats, plus about 10 Left members.   What this analysis indicates is that a Left challenger, even if one did emerge, would only get a low percentage of PLP votes, but could get a much higher tally of CLP and union votes. (more…)

One of the little noticed aspects of this newly spatchcocked Tory-Liberal Government is that     Nick Clegg, farmed out as Deputy Prime Minister (‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’ as the US Vice-presidency was once delicately described), will actually have a job to do: taking on constitutional renewal.   Attention has focused on electoral reform – the commitment to bring in a referendum on AV.   But that is far the weakest option for electoral reform since it contains no element of proportionality, and is actually less important than other changes in the structure of power that are now at last coming on the agenda. (more…)

No sooner had Gordon Brown declared on the steps of Downing Street on Monday that democratic renewal was at the heart of his election commitment than his promise faded away on Tuesday like a will o’ the wisp.   The House had voted by a large margin 5 weeks ago to set up an elected Back-Bench Business Committee to take from the Executive control of all non-government business on the floor of the House.   All that was required for a significant advance in parliamentary democracy was for the Government, bowing to the will of the House, to bring forward a motion to change Standing Orders in the way the House had decreed.

The Government failed to do that for 5 weeks.   Now in the last few hours and days before Parliament is dissolved – the so-called wash-up period when everything left to the last moment is rushed through in a last-minute frenzy – the Government has tabled the necessary motion, which can be subject to amendment by any M.P.   Surprise, surprise, 4 M.P.s moved amendments which mean that the matter has to be debated for up to 1.5 hours before it can be voted on (notwithstanding that it has already been fully debated and voted on only a few weeks ago).   Harriet Harman, as Leader of the House, then announces today that the Government cannot find the time to provide for the one-and-a-half hour debate  – though the Government can find the time for a debate and vote on the Digital Economy Bill which has been rushed through without proper discussion and is extremely contentious.

The democratic reform of parliament is thus snuffed out and has to await the new Government after the election when the balance of forces is anyone’s guess.   But there is a twist to this story of skulduggery.   Tony Wright, the chair of the select committee which recommended this reform, wrote to the 4 MPs (significantly all Labour) asking them to withdraw their amendments so that the new Standing Orders could be approved.   One of them, Hilary Armstrong, emailed back to say that she wasn’t at Westminster, but had forwarded his  request to the Whips.   That let the cat out of the bag.   She had been put up to it by the Whips, and as everyone knows the Whips don’t take initiatives like this without the full knowledge and blessing of No.10.

So on Monday the PM gave full-hearted support to parliamentary reform at the front door of No.10, and then on Tuesday firmly squelched it through the back door.   No wonder the public are cynical about political promises – from all parties.

After years of numbing defeats in the Commons, progressive forces have finally today secured some striking victories in a series of votes which could radically change the effectiveness of the House in future struggles with the Executive, and in particular with No.10.   The votes today for the first time give the House ownership of its Select Committees by requiring chairmen and members to be elected, not appointed by the Whips, and reclaims for the House control over its own business by allowing the House, not the Government, to determine through an elected  Back-Bench House Business Committee the agenda on the floor of the House in respect of all non-Ministerial business.

In today’s debate I spelt out in a short speech the long-term profound implication of this.

Harriet Harman’s stalling yesterday over the Wright committee’s very modest democratic reform proposals for Parliament is ominous. Question: what is the worst thing that has happened to Parliament in the last decade or two? Expenses scandal! No, not actually. Far less sensational, but more insidious, has been the steady and continuing decline in the raison d’etre of Parliament, the fundamental purpose for which Parliament exists in the first place – to hold the Executive to account. Over the last 30 years Parliament has become ever more subservient, more sycophantic, more tribalistically loyalist. It failed utterly to hold the Thatcher-Major governments to account over arms to Iraq, the Blair government over Iraq, and the Brown government over capitaulation to the City. Then at the nadir over expenses, it was agreed by all three parties that the rock-bottom reputation of Parliament could only be salvaged by regenerating a new forceful democratic role for it to become a properly effective scrutinising and decision-making chamber for the nation’s business. The Wright committee was appointed by the PM to put flesh on this aspiration. Now all that visionary rhetoric is in danger of dissipating as the forces of darkness (the whips of both parties) concert to block any change that challenges their own power.

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Alistair Darling has earned plaudits in his pre-budget report for playing a bad hand well in dreadful circumstances. Certainly he has avoided the Tory hara kiri option for the economy of making drastic cuts straightaway which would undoubtedly plunge the economy into a nosedive and deepen and prolong the recession. He has tried to protect priority areas like ‘front-line’ education, health and overseas aid (but without revealing how deep the cuts will be in other important areas like housing, transport and the environment), and he has tilted the tax burden towards the richest 2% to protect the lowest incomes, the State pension, and skills training for the young unemployed. But there is a third option which never surfaced and offers a much better and fairer strategy, namely to shift the pattern of tax much more strongly on to the perpetrators of the crisis which combined with a public investment programme in job creation to spur the return to economic growth, plus the axeing of major public expenditure programmes which have never been justified and cannot now be afforded, could avoid unwarranted public sector cuts altogether.
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The significance of the publication today of the House of Commons Reform Committee report, entitled ‘Rebuilding the House’, has been largely swamped by the press spectacular over the Chilcot Iraqgate inquiry. Which is a pity, because Parliamentary reform is the irreducible necessity for any recovery of public confidence in the political system, and the Wright Committee report offers a very good start. It was (deliberately) given a narrow remit, to examine the case for a Business Committee of the House elected by secret ballot of all Back Benchers, for election of the chairs and members of Select Committee, and for new procedures to allow the electorate to press by public petition for key issues chosen by them to be debated and voted on on the floor of the House or be referred to the appropriate Select Committee for full consideration. Collectively these reforms would make the Government much more accountable both to Parliament and to the electorate and they would begin to shift significant power away from the Executive, particularly No.10, and in favour of the legislature. Parliament would begin again to be fit for purpose.

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The really big issue in the 6 months left before the election is the restoration of Parliamentary democracy so that post-election the Commons can exercise its real role (which it has not done for years) of vigorously and effectively holding the Government to account. But despite the cross-party Wright Committee having just reported 4 days ago on their remit to examine the need for an elected Business Committee of the House, for elected chairs and members of Select Committees, and for members of the public to have their petitions seriously examined and responded to, there is no mention in the Queen’s Speech on how this should all be taken forward. That is not to say that many of the actual Bills presented do not have considerable merit – certainly the dismissal of them by the media and the Tories as insubstantial or mere electioneering is unfair and clearly wrong. Requiring parenting assessment of ASBO children, a mandatory social price support scheme for the fuel poor, the blocking of monstrous City bonuses and excessive risk-taking by the banks, free personal care for a third of a million pensioners in greatest need, and making 0.7% of GDP going to overseas aid a legal requirement are all significant advances. Even so, the Parliamentary accountability issue remains critical – and absent.

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Parturiunt montes, et nascitur mus, as the Roman epigrammatist said 2,000 years ago – the mountains are in labour and bring forth a mouse. That’s a fitting epitaph to New Labour’s Constitutional Reform Bill which will be considered in detail for two days in the Commons this week. Frankly, the Government’s blown it, on two counts. Gordon Brown announced within days of becoming prime minister that he intended a major reform to make government more accountable. This Bill is nothing of the kind: it is a minor and rather insignificant tidying up job. It proposes that restrictions on protest outside Parliament be ended, that MPs have greater powers over declarations of war (largely making de jure what they already have de facto), that the civil service code be given statutory force, that the attorney general’s inconsistent position as a minister responsible to the Cabinet and as an agent of the State independent of government should be maintained (a retrograde fix), and that elections to replace the 92 hereditaries in the House of Lords when they die should be abolished. Some of this is useful, but it’s pretty trivial stuff. Nothing about making the Executive more accountable to parliament, or about an elected second chamber, or about electoral reform. But there’s a second reason too why this Bill is a cop-out.

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Jack Straw’s modest pot of constitutional scraps offered earlier this week is a depressing anti-climax after some of the most tumultuous upheavals in modern political history opened the gate to much more profound change. Constitutional reform, never a prospect to set the Thames on fire and ejected by the recession even from the mildly titillating platform laid out by Gordon Brown on the third day of his premiership, shot back into prominence as the means to redeem the expenses scandal. The party leaders vied with each other as to who was the most radical in transforming an anachronistic and moribund parliament. Now the opportunity for once-in-a-century root-and-branch change is in danger of dissipating. Nothing about bringing forward a written constitution which Britain, in company with only a few other countries like New Zealand and Israel, still lacks. Nothing about a Bill of Rights to begin to turn around the authoritarian erosion of civil liberties in the last three decades. Nothing even about an elected second chamber, electoral reform, or a fixed term for parliaments. Just a tidying up of a few odds and ends.

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The controversial re-appointment of Trevor Phillips as Chair of the Equalities Commission raises important questions that go wider than the issue of equality of treatment in Britain. It is certainly significant that resignations from the Commission had already occurred prior to the re-appointment, which might have been expected to act as a clear warning sign of serious discontent within the organisation at the autocratic management style of the Chairman, and in addition junior ministerial concern had also been made public beforehand. Nevertheless, all this unease was brushed aside and Phillips was re-appointed last week. That led to the resignation on Friday of the forceful disabilities rights campaigner, Baroness Campbell, and now two further senior resignations, of another disabilities rights campaigned and a human rights academic. Thus a third of the board of 16 have now resigned rather than accept Phillips as Chair. So why, given this unprecedented public display of no confidence, was he still re-appointed?

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The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is a remarkable creation: it not only seeks rather heavy-handedly to draw a line under MPs’ expenses as the biggest political scandal in modern times, it also threatens to undermine a fundamental component of the Bill of Rights of 1689. Further, it does raise the rather pressing question as to what is the motivation for it in the first place whenthere is already a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards – indeed has been one for a considerable time (the present one, John Lyon, is the 4th Commissioner). In addition, it was Gordon Brown himself who set up the Committee under Sir Christopher Kelly to report to him by the end of the year on MPs’ expenses and how they should be reformed, yet we now find IPSA precipitately brought forward and steamrollered through the Commons in 2 days as though the Kelly Committee had never been heard of. It all suggests a panic reaction to be seen at all costs to be doing something, regardless of action already being taken. That this is a political P.R. construct rather than a necessary economic reform is also highlighted by the fact that the infinitely greater excesses of the bankers, their avarice undimmed with their Bonuses are Back culture, including Hester’s £15m at the State-owned RBS, are simply being let off the hook altogether, with the Treasury risibly asking them to sign up to a voluntary code of conduct. But there are still other aspects of the IPSA Bill which are seriously worrying.

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There’s nothing like a crisis to throw into sharp relief the contours of the power structure that have long been latent until they burst out into the open under the force of events. It has been a long time since anybody believed that Parliament ran the country or was the final decision-taker in the nation’s affairs. Power has long since drained upwards, beginning with Lloyd George a century ago, towards the Cabinet and the Prime Minister. But the veneer of collegiality lingered on in the UK after the Second World War, even when Richard Crossman was still complaining that “the power of the Prime Minister has grown, is still growing, and should be cut back”. It was however only the ascendancy of Thatcher that consigned the premier’s role as primus inter pares to history, and that process of consolidating prime ministerial power was taken much further by Blair. He first consolidated his power within the Labour party by devaluing the role of the unions, party conference and national executive. He then systematically used the party machine to promote favoured (Blairite) candidates at selection conferences in order to clone the PLP with his own supporters who provided him with an ultra-reliable praetorian guard within Parliament. Having secured his party and parliamentary base and eliminated any serious challenge to his own position, he assiduously wooed the prevailing sources of power both within the UK (the City, CBI and the media) by giving them almost whatever they asked, and also on the world stage by slavishly cultivating whoever happened to be the US President (since Clinton and Bush could hardly be more different). Now all of that has fallen to pieces.

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